China Search Daily

May 25th-26th, 2007, Xiamen Xianglu Grand Hotel, ISAS teams will welcome all the guests with Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2007.

Yes, China Search Event is going home next year.

Xiamen is the destination.

A hotel with 1525 rooms and grand conference ball room can handle all the activeties for attendees.

Are you ready, the event site is launching, probably the space is limited. You cant afford to miss it. It’s time to mark your calendar.

For more information about the venue, here are some factors and comments.

Mr. Xie said good bye to the CEO position of Yahoo China recently. He was only there for about 40 days. Allen Wang, the one who picked the chinese name for Google, said good bye to his Google China position.

And Johnny Chou almost did the same things.

I felt like this was the farewell season for internet industry in China. Are they graduating from the position? I dont think so.

This is just a game. Players moved from one to the other, or from managers to entrepreneurs. Yes they all said so, they wanted to launch their own business.

Good idea, maybe good excuse.

Tom Online is going to merge all the business of Ebay China, including Paypal China.

Does this mean that Ebay failed in the competition with Alibaba’s Taobao and Alipay? Maybe!

But the central government is going to carefully control the online payment in China. The licience is needed in the coming month for Paypal China.

Maybe Tom Online can get one of the licience, but for sure Ebay China is hard to get it.

Yes the competition with Alibaba and the Online Payment Licience may be the two main reason for this rumor. And most of the time, rumor come true.

Google anounced its 19th china reseller, Hangzhou Gototime, at today.

Let’s review the first step of google china reseller project:

Google signs up first AdWords partner in China

SHANGHAI, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) has agreed to sell its popular AdWords advertisements in China through a local firm, in the first such deal for the global search leader since winning a China business license.

Under their agreement, China Enterprise, a provider of IT services and a subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed Sino-i Technology Ltd. (0250.HK: Quote, Profile, Research), has been authorised to sell the Google AdWords service — used in markets around the world — in China.

Sino-i Technology shares were up 6.47 percent at HK$0.148 on Monday, after rising as much as 11 percent.

“By aligning with CE, with its leading position in China’s e-commerce and (small and medium enterprise) market and large customer base, Google can now provide… businesses in China with easy access to Google AdWords,” the companies said in a joint statement.

 

AdWords allows advertisers to pay to have their ads appear on a results page when an Internet user searches for particular words on Google.

 

The partnership is the first to be announced by Google since it received a business license earlier this year to operate in China, the world’s second-largest Internet market with more than 100 million users.

Google is in the process of formulating its China strategy, including expanding staffing for an eventual permanent office and staff in the country despite its relatively late arrival.

Rival Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) made its big move into China in 2003, with the $120 million purchase of a popular local search site, 3721.com.

Google already owns a 2.6 percent stake in leading Chinese search engine Baidu.com (BIDU.O: Quote, Profile, Research), whose shares more than quadrupled on their debut after the Beijing-based firm’s IPO last week — the best debut on the Nasdaq since the dot-com era.

Google is believed to have tried to increase its stake in Baidu prior to the IPO, but was rebuffed by the Chinese company.

California-based Google is now trying to formulate its next step in China, deciding on whether to wait for a new chance to boost its stake in Baidu or to forge ahead in a market where it already enjoys strong brand recognition despite its late arrival.

12 months, 19 players, looks like a very good performance report. But if you look at the market share report, Google China didnt had significant improvement compared with 12 months ago. Baidu and Yahoo china still in front of Google China, although the real name business at Yahoo China was suffering a thrinking .

Are all those resellers Mr Right for google Adwords? Are they using ROI-oriented strategies to serve their client? What kind of marketing strategies they are using? Did they competed with each other? What’s the percentage of advertisers complaints?

The most important question is, how Google China will evaluate it performance for the past 12 months with strong figures at revenue.

Yes the most powerful answer is always the numbers. That can be exciting, or embarrassing.

19 players, who will out and who will be the 20th?

Who Care!!

China Internet Conference 2006 is coming soon. Only 40 days left.

The english site went alive now.

Time to register for a pass!

I noticed a new title for Mr. Ma. That is “the enemy of .com”.

Mr. Ma, CEO of Tencent (HKSE:0700.HK), became more and more aggresive and want to reach for every single market segment in Internet.

QQ is the core competence of Tencent’s business. QQ is the leading IM sofeware in China, 60% of chinese IM user stick with QQ all the time.

Before, QQ was OICQ, a chinese version of ICQ, after the argument of copyright with ICQ. QQ became Tencent’s new brand for its IM, during the past years, QQ beated most of the chinese IM softwares.

But now, QQ is far more than just an IM. Tencent already grew its portal QQ.com, online game, online payment tool ( like paypal ), wireless value-addeed service….

Mr. Ma and his tencent even reach to C2C business with its paipai.com

Another Mr. Ma from Alibaba started to complain about Tencent and it paipai.com. So did many other .com CEOs.

Tencent is digging every single resource through it QQ IM. They just follow other .com’s steps, re-create their business model. Most of the .com will like to say that’s simply “copy”.

That’ why Mr. Ma and it Tencent became “the Enemy of the .com”.

For sure, we can find his QQ family growing bigger  and bigger.

For the past 5 years, China SMEs and their owners really exprienced all the the goods and bads of internet.  Most the experiences came from their website, their pages at B2B and their ranking or PPC at search engines.

Some made a profit, some made nothing.

They already learned lession. Sometimes, they still get angry when they were disturbed by an unexpected phone call from so-called internet companies. But most of time, they gradually realised that revelency was the most valuable asset of internet.

They should be away from those fault service, but they are looking for real internet marketing service at the same time.

We need more reliable person and brand to tell the truth of internet marketing.

We need more integrated internet marketing strategies to meet different needs. Their budgets range from $500 a month to $4,000 a month. They are exporters, factory owners, foreign trading companies, gaming teams……

I got more and more global internet marketing queries from different cities in China. And more and more chinese internet marketing queries from oversea.

More and more qualified players are needed here, with local knowledge and global communication skill.

From the midnight of June 23th, to the afternoon of 24th, beijing time, Google’s .cn domain and MSN’s .cn domain were hijacked for hours.

All the visits to www.google.cn were redirected to a chinese B2B site, which was owned by a .cn domain registrar. The same happened to MSN and 4 other global brands.

At the year of 2002. Google.com was once hijacked and redirected to Baidu in China.

Whenever I come across a foreign friend, “some sites were blocked at china” is one of the issue they will mention in one or two sentences.

Typically, some blog sites and bbs were blocked all the time. Such as my favorite Wordpress.com and Blogger.com.

Some times google will be down for some hours, which also happened to some foreign portals. But they appear again soon, which means they know how to do PR in China.

MSN my space also had the same experience, but they always came back in hours or not more than one day. But some free space never came back.

What happened? Why blocked?

I believed, and for sure, that all the blocked issues or contents are nothing to do with business, and are considered as evil thing in China.

Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’e be evil.” That works in China. Evil has diferrent culture background, when you are going to make a “evil” judgement, do please “put your foot in other’s shoes”.

I would like to say something about those “blocked” issue. Be business, dont be evil.

None of the business sites and contents were blocked or forever. To buy or sale something in china is nothing to do with evil things.

Once some evil content appear at your business site, remove it as soon as possible, then you will be back. MSN my space practiced it very well.

Pure business and real business person are always welcomed in China.

According to the lunar calander, today is Dragon Boat’s Day.

Happy Dragon Boat’s Day from chinese search engines:

Baidu shows us a picture of Zongzi dumplings, which is the traditional food for this festival.

Google presents a real Dragon Boat, there is always a Dragon Boat Game at this festival. Very popular even at oversea countries.

Sina greets us with a real Dragon Boad Game, we can see boats competing with each other.

Sohu does nothing for this festival, Sogou means a Dog for Search, maybe Dog does care about our traditional festival.

Yahoo does something, not for Dragon Boats day, but for World Cup 2006. Every day is World Cup day now, I love World Cup too, but they sould at least show some respect to chinese tradition, otherwise, their localization will be just a JOKE!

Thanks to Zhongsou, although I seldom use their search engine, I like this logo, they pay a real repect to the great poet, Qu Yuan. The festival is to worship him! Zongzi Dumplings and Dragon Boat were all related to him.

Summary for this festival:
One of the legend says:
“on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in 278 B.C., Qu Yuan committed suicide by grasping a large rock and throwing himself into the Miluo River.

Local fisherman raced to their boats to recover his body, beating drums and splashing their paddles on the water to scare away the fish. But it was all to no avail. In one version of the legend, they began throwing rice on the water as a sacrifice to their dead hero, and to nourish his spirit. One night, the image of Qu Yuan appeared to one of the fisherman in a dream. In the dream, the poet revealed that the fish were eating the rice. He asked that the rice be wrapped in silk to protect it. Later, the silk was replaced with bamboo leaves.”

This story also tells us the history of dragon boat race and zongzi dumpling (Rice Packets).

Here is more information about this festival http://chinesefood.about.com/od/foodfestivals/a/dragonboat.htm